Chapter 14: The Only Road

Livio was in the office door before the deputy had signed off.

"Tuesday," he said. "They've been forty minutes away for a week. I'm going down there."

"In what?" I said. "Your car's in a scrapyard in Calais."

"I'll borrow the truck."

"No," I said. "You call your men, Achille hears it by morning. You go down there alone, you come back in a bag. And they still know where she is."

I put my hand on my belly.

"I'm not living the next three months waiting for a car in the lot. We do it the other way."

"What other way?"

"There's one road into Lubec," I said. "One. Route 189. And everybody on it eats breakfast at my counter."

Orsola looked at me over her glasses.

Then she smiled, slow.

"Pie Thursday," she said.

By the next morning, the whole town was in on it.

I told it at the counter while I poured coffee. A black Suburban, Pennsylvania plates, two men. Anybody sees it, or any car like it, call the motel.

The tall lobsterman wrote the plate number on his hand in ballpoint.

The harbormaster came up the hill for the first time all winter.

"They could come by water," he said. "Off the Canada side, or up from Cutler."

"Could they?"

"Not without me seeing it."

"What if they're listening on the phone?" one of the church women asked.

"Ask if it's Pie Thursday," the one with the hearing aids bellowed. "Everybody asks that."

"And then what?"

He thought about it.

"Then say what kind. Blueberry means it's them."

It worked.

On the third day the phone rang during the rush, and it was the kid at the gas station.

"Is it Pie Thursday?"

"It's Monday."

"Blueberry," he whispered. "They're at the pump. One got out and bought cigarettes and looked up the hill for a long time."

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